India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, right, with Judith D’Souza, whose release she secured from captivity in Afghanistan in July, 2016 (Photo: @SushmaSwaraj)
It is not at all surprising for me that India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has become what a headline in The Wall Street Journal describes as the country’s “best-loved politician.” Having interacted with her regularly throughout the decade of the 1990s during my stint in New Delhi as South Asia chief correspondent of the IANS wire and India Abroad weekly newspaper, I know that the sobriquet fits rather well.
In a perhaps much milder sense it was said of Swaraj what was also said of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) grandee Atal Behari Vajpayee—that she was the right leader in the wrong party. Of course, there is a strong degree of naiveté in this characterization because both Vajpayee and Swaraj are in a party with which they have a strong ideological, emotional and cultural affinity. I mention it here because many people are unable to square their moderate and even quasi-liberal demeanor with the core hardline right-wing politics of the BJP as embodied in many of her colleagues and especially a rash of lunatic voices among its extended affiliates.
Swaraj, who is justifiably earning plaudits for her efficiently humanistic running of the foreign ministry, still quaintly called external affairs ministry, has powerfully used social media in general and Twitter in particular to resolves hundreds and hundreds of problems faced by Indians around the world every day. She is perhaps the most responsive cabinet member in the Narendra Modi government who does not stop at token acknowledgement but actually resolves problems.
Reading Swaraj’s twitter feed daily is like reading a continuous litany of problems from around the world brought to her attention by ordinary citizens and solved in real time in a very hands-on and very specific way. Although foreign ministers are often seen as exalted people who move around in rarefied diplomatic circles averse to being muddied by grimy problems of the hoi polloi, Swaraj has emerged as the very antithesis of it. It is no surprise that she has 8.7 million followers on Twitter which apparently puts her among the top ten most followed politician in the world.
She brings a problem-solving practicality to her approach free of the grandiosity of her position as India’s top diplomat. Of course, skeptics might point out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi inordinately controls the grander functions of foreign policy and thereby reducing Swaraj’s primary role. It is unprecedented in India’s government history that a minister, and that too a foreign minister, is so accessible, so hands-on and so result-driven in a way that directly impacts individuals and families. Normal consular hardships of Indian and other citizens would figure at the base of the foreign ministry totem pole. But Swaraj, always known to be earnest in whatever she does, has elevated that aspect to a much higher level of visibility and effectiveness.
Unlike any of her predecessors Swaraj clearly sees the human aspect of the foreign ministry. Luckily for her, her tenure has coincided with the proliferation of social media, in particular Twitter which eliminates intermediaries, usually the staid and often unhelpful bureaucrats, and allows ordinary citizens to directly seek her attention.
During my years in Delhi it was my experience that Swaraj was always accessible and always free of spin even as she presented her party’s point of view on various issues. That she is extremely articulate combined with her candor was a prime reason why journalists like me regularly sought her out.